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Stelle Speaks Spanish and Tagalog | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4147 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes  Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 153 of 384 05 January 2014 at 10:09pm | IP Logged |
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I struggled a lot with my Spanish Skype session today. I know that it's natural, but I find it very frustrating that
one day I feel fluent and confident, and another day I seem to stumble over every second word. Today I kept getting stuck and trying to translate from English. I know that to improve, I need to think in Spanish. And most of the time I manage - just not today. Luckily, I have another 30-minute session tomorrow, and I fully expect to redeem myself! I haven't touched my anki decks in three days. It just seems like…work. I know that work is a good thing, and that I need to keep building my vocabulary, but a break of a few days won't kill me. I'll tackle my anki decks tomorrow and get caught up. I still have four chapters left in the Spanish verb workbook that I'd planned on finishing by the end of December - and which I could easily have done in just 20 minutes a day. But I'm much more interested in extensive activities right now: reading, watching, chatting on Skype. I'm not terribly worried about this. I know that I'll naturally be drawn back to formal study when I need it. I've gone through at least two long blocks of time where I set grammar aside, coming back to the book only when my frustration level increased to the point where I needed it - first to learn past tense, and later to learn present subjunctive. I can feel myself needing some more complicated verbal structures now - which was part of my frustration during today's Skype session - so I expect that I'll crack open the book again any day now. I find it interesting that I have these peaks and valleys, where I start out feeling very confident until my frustration peaks, I learn whatever grammar point I currently need, and then I feel confident again. I know that this cycle of confidence and frustration is very common. I've seen it in my students for over a decade. But it's really interesting to experience it myself! 2014 Spanish challenge, week one: 100 45-minute TV shows: 4/100 1 episode of Buffy (3.7) 1 episode of Nuestros caminos a Santiago (1.1) 3 episodes of The Simpsons (1.7, 1.8, 1.9) 1 episode of Isabel (2.12) 100 Skype conversations: 3/100 2.5 hours with Skype Spanish tutors 100 short texts: 2/100 post on italki email to a language partner 14 novels: 0/14 52 pages of Harry Potter y la camera secret edited to add a missing word Edited by Stelle on 05 January 2014 at 10:14pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |
| PointsDotsLines Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4009 days ago 76 posts - 110 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 154 of 384 05 January 2014 at 11:16pm | IP Logged |
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¡Qué bien tenías una semana productivo!
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| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4147 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 155 of 384 12 January 2014 at 10:37pm | IP Logged |
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I'm absolutely thrilled to have finished the second Harry Potter book this week. Today, I experienced a first in
Spanish: I lost track of time while reading. Generally I enjoy reading in Spanish, but it isn't the same as in English. It feels like work - fun work, but work. Today, though, I found myself turning page after page, unable to put down my book. I read 45 pages this afternoon, which is more than I've ever read in Spanish in one sitting. I feel like this is a major breakthrough for me. I plan on reading all of the Harry Potter books this year, and I already own book 3, but for now I'm going to move on to another series. I'm going to start reading the Percy Jackson series tomorrow. I have the first three books on my bookshelf. I had a quick look at the reading levels for Percy Jackson and Harry Potter, and it appears that the Percy Jackson books are a bit easier, especially when compared with the later Harry Potter books. It makes more sense to start with easier books and read the harder ones a bit later. My goal for reading right now is really extensive reading: reading for fun, at a relatively quick pace, using novels that I can understand without having to look up too many words. I taught elementary school for 8 years, and I know that children develop most quickly as readers when they read "just right" books - books that are easy by anyone's standards, but not so easy that they don't hold the reader's attention. As their skills progress, so too does the difficulty of the text that they're reading - but they will always seem "easy" to the reader. An appropriate independent reading level is 95%+, and that's what I've been aiming for in Spanish. Much as my students improved almost without noticing it, I've been improving steadily and quietly. While Roald Dahl was my "just right" level a few months ago, now his books are too easy for me. In October, Harry Potter seemed impossible and I put it away for a few months. Today, I found myself completely enthralled with the second book - a very good sign that it's the perfect book for my current reading level. I expect that by the end of 2014 (after having read the Percy Jackson series, the Harry Potter series and the Hunger Games trilogy), I'll be more than ready to move on to books written in Spanish for adults. In the meantime, I'm quite happy with my steady diet of translated pre-teen and young adult novels. It's a good thing that I love children's literature in any language! 2014 Spanish challenge, week two: 100 45-minute TV shows: 5 (9/100) 1 episode of Buffy (3.8) 6 episodes of The Simpsons (1.10, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 2.1, 2.2) - counts as 3 for tracking purposes 1 episode of Isabel (2.13) 100 Skype conversations: 2 (5/100) 30 minutes with my Dad 45 minutes with a Skype tutor 100 short texts: 2 (4/100) introduction on Lobos thread text corrected by tutor 14 novels: 1 (1/14) finished Harry Potter y la camara secret Edited by Stelle on 12 January 2014 at 10:41pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5012 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 156 of 384 13 January 2014 at 12:48am | IP Logged |
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Congratulations! It's awesome to get lost in a book, the more when it is in another language and for the first time! You've progressed immensely!
Don't worry about the ups and downs much. It just happens and it's normal. More practice and focus on thinking in Spanish, that is all great so don't let it get spoiled by feeling bad about the worse days. :-) You're awesome. Take a huge backpack to Spain so that you can carry home all the compliments you'll receive there ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4625 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish | Message 157 of 384 13 January 2014 at 2:07am | IP Logged |
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Great description of the "just right" approach, and it's made me reconsider my next book to read. I just finished a
bit of a challenge, so maybe I'll drop back down to an more comfortable level for a change. There are still lots of new words in a simpler text, and it's less of an energy drain. Congratulations on finishing HP2. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4147 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 158 of 384 15 January 2014 at 11:46pm | IP Logged |
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@Cavesa, thanks for the kind words and encouragement! You made me laugh out loud with your backpack
comment. @BAnna, thanks for the comment! I honestly find that if I force myself to read something that's too hard, I just don't get much out of it. Probably because I'm impulsive - I don't like a slog if I can avoid it. ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4147 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 159 of 384 15 January 2014 at 11:54pm | IP Logged |
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I just finished lesson 37 of FSI. I'm glad that I'm working on subjunctive now. I did the subjunctive lessons on
Duolingo - 3 lessons and 14 minutes later, I got a virtual trophy for mastering the subjunctive. Ha! I use FSI as a purely audio course. When I first started, I would read the text after or before each lesson, but that grew stale very quickly. Then I started referring to the text only when I didn't understand. Now, I just listen and respond. If I don't catch a lesson the first time, I listen to it a second time. I find that that takes care of 98% of any problems that I had the first time around. As for the final 2%…I just don't worry about it. I'm starting to think about what I'm going to do with my walking time when I finish FSI. I work on FSI every day while walking the dog. There's no way that I'd sit down and do it at my desk, but I actually find it somewhat meditative to do response drills while walking. Yes, I realize that makes me sound kind of lame. After finishing with FSI, I think that I'm going to move on to audiobooks. I'm thinking about listening to the first Harry Potter book. I read it right before Christmas, so I'm not sure that it would hold my attention, but I do think that there's a lot to be gained from repeated exposure to material. As for reading, I started the first Percy Jackson novel. It's taken me most of the first chapter to get into it. It seems more difficult than I expected, but I suspect that it's just because I have to get used to the novel's voice. I fully expect the second book in the series to be an easy read after I make my way through the first one. Edited by Stelle on 15 January 2014 at 11:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5210 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 160 of 384 16 January 2014 at 11:11am | IP Logged |
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I'm enjoying your log, I think you have good ideas about things like reading and speaking and it looks like they're working! I've been learning Spanish for a few weeks now, and I've tried the early speaking approach and had a few conversations, but they've been pretty difficult. I'm wondering whether it's just because conversing in Spanish is new to me and I'm not used to it, or if it's just that my knowledge isn't very high yet. Probably a bit of both. But like I say it's very early days!
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